The Place Where India Meets the World: A New Film by the Otolith Group

Presented at the Rubin Museum, New York, can art offer a way of viewing nature as an actor in its own right?
Tausif Noor, Frieze, June 25, 2019
We begin in a blazing world: In the opening sequence of O Horizon (2018), the Otolith Group’s latest film, as part of their exhibition ‘A Lost Future’ at the Rubin Museum in New York, flames lick the mechanical engines of excavator diggers on a forest road. ‘Today in a hundred years’, recites a voice, ‘Who are you reading this poem?’ Smoke rises toward the sky as man and machine intervene in nature. ‘What fragment of today’s joyous spring / Today’s wild flower or bird song / Today’s blood-red mood’, the voice continues, ‘Can I possibly transmit unto you?’ These lines, excerpted from the cosmopolitan polymath Rabindranath Tagore’s 1895 poem, ‘The Year 1400’, act as a coda to the film, which was researched, filmed and produced over five years in the Indian state of West Bengal. Flitting between music, dance, poetry and literature, O Horizon offers a fragmented yet engrossing view of a Tagorean ethos, one that situates modernism, cosmopolitanism and ecopolitical awareness as products of experimental modes of learning.
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